Helping companies communicate better
This entry was spurred by Adriana Cronin-Lukas’ entry on her company’s website, Big Blog Company. A quote, if you will:
“Calacanis blogs (and Denton’s for that matter) have a mission, sell as much advertising as they can by generating hits for their blogs. Can’t blame them for trying, but it shows the fundamental misunderstanding of blog audiences, individuals that feel they are getting something valuable and a distinctive alternative to professional or industry media and publications.”
I don’t know if it’s a fear of blogs or a total disregard for their power, but too many companies are underestimating this medium. I can understand that if a blog only gets 20,000 visitors a month that some companies might see it as insignificant. However, if a major publication or independent publisher such as Slashdot pick up on the story then that 20,000 becomes millions quickly.
If a blog publisher is going to have a significant amount of people going to their blog then you know that they are fairly passionate about what they do. If I am NetFlix and I see a request from a
Being a transparent company or one that claims to cater to their customers is not a selective option. You cannot pick and choose who you wish to give the best customer service towards because everyone should be important. The beauty of what Hacking NetFlix was doing was giving free PR to NetFlix. Word-of-Mouth advertising from loyal customers for nothing. How many times do people come up to your company asking if they can help spread the word? If and when it does happen will you turn them away?
Of course there is a reason to fear blogs if you do all the wrong things. Blogs help to bring out what is really on in the minds of consumers. Maybe that is what NetFlix thought. If that is the case then they already have deeper problems within their organization that need to be resolved.
Blogs can either be your enemy or your best friend depending on the principles within your organization. After reading the entry at Hacking NetFlix I have to question the principles of NetFlix. They are targetting a new niche in the movie rental industry and one where we are passing the early adopter stage so I would think it would be in NetFlix’s best interest to help the early adopters convince everyone else to use their service. This truly was a missed opportunity.
Our friend Michael Angeles at urlgreyhot discusses his frustration with current technology, and his switch to wikis for a personal knowledge inventory:
“After spending a little time yesterday trying to add links to my weblinks directory and then filing them under my Drupal book pages, I think it’s time to start using a wiki.”
You can read more from his weblog entry discussing his switch.
Many companies still view blogging as something only done for personal reasons or by people who wish to show pictures of their cat. For these companies I decided to give a short rundown of some of the benefits that a company (and an individual) would experience from having a weblog. Keep in mind that there are a large number of benefits that come with blogging, but I will only highlight some of the major ones.
Companies like to hype products before they launch. Why? They believe it will generate interest for their product and when it launches people will buy it. Another reason to do is to prevent customers from buying the competition’s product because they will wait for the next big thing.
When preparing to launch Business Logs we did some minor advertising on our own sites that did its job of generating interest without going overboard. We could have played it so that you would think that the “solutions” we were developing would solve every problem for you and your company. Mainly we talked about the company before it launched due to our own excitement. After receiving 10,000 page views in the first 12 hours of existence we realized we did something right.